1. Recognize that you were made for these times While I don’t believe that you have to do it all alone, or you are meant to face every challenge that comes to you as a lone island, I do believe that you were born in this body, in this time on earth, with this focus […]
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I’m in yet another iteration of this specific trauma-recreation I’ve done for several years now—where I end up in *someone else’s home-space* (sometimes in their same house; sometimes, like now, in a separate structure, but still within the broader parameters of “theirs” & relying on their resources to some extent)—and I am there at their invitation, which could be withdrawn at any time—& they are communicating (sometimes even voluntarily reassuring) that they want me there—but I just get more & more panicked as time goes on that they’re angry with me, that they resent me, are disappointed in me, that they regret having offered, that it’s only a matter of time until they explode at me—that I am in danger, that I am unsafe—& I reach out! I check in! I express my feelings & concerns to them!
But no matter how much they affirm, I don’t really feel any better—I don’t believe them, I don’t trust them, my instincts are frantically convinced otherwise—my sleep schedule gets wrecked because I’m too anxious to sleep at night; I don’t eat enough because I don’t have my own kitchen & it feels too stressful to navigate theirs (which also makes it very difficult for me to sleep); I hide in whatever “my” borrowed subsection of space is, much of the day, disassociating into the internet—I take my anxiety meds and they’re swamped into ineffectiveness, I take my stimulants & they’ve overwhelmed into ineffectiveness by trauma freeze mode—I’m so afraid I can’t think clearly or make decisions, even basic daily self-maintaining tasks feels difficult.
In these situations I’ve also usually agreed to some amount of work-trade/labor-helping as well, which I end up too freaked out to do much of—which only spirals the anxiety out worse, every day that passes & I don’t “do enough”—compounding shame & frustration—I breathe shallowly, I frantically try to self-soothe—I’m trapped & ineffective, sui ideation starts becoming a fixation—my distress compounds & compounds until it’s painful enough that I fling myself out of the situation somehow, totally a mess, desperate. Again & again.
I keep getting The Devil (The Guardian, in my deck) as something I need, as advice to engage with; but I can barely function—how do I untangle this kind of compulsion?
(And I still don’t know whether my perspective is wrong or not; they usually do end up upset, at the end, because I’m being difficult & weird & evasive—I’m looking at them terrified like a mouse creeping into a fox den over & over, fully expecting to be eaten. I can’t tell if it’s that it switches over at some point or if there were problems from the start.)(People often DON’T tell you when they’re upset! That’s a real thing!)
I can tell myself all kinds of reasonable perspectives & strategies but they too are overrun by my fear; all forms of medicine fully swallowed up & inaccessible.
(Pippi often really likes the person or people I’m afraid of, in these situations; she runs over to them & cuddles & will refuse to come to me when I call her, will be exasperated with me for avoiding them. This probably means something, but I still can’t hold it.)
This time there are kittens I’m socializing though, & they’re still little, & I want to see that through, so leaving doesn’t feel real; also job interview on the 12th, someone I want to meet returning on the 16th. But I’ve woken up two mornings in a row with my heart racing about 5am after only a couple hours of sleep, & trying to get myself together to even make a town trip for groceries feels vast, immense, & complicated. Keeping on this path is harming me & it also feels like this time I shouldn’t leave, at least not yet; I don’t know how to feel safe enough to exist.
(As for why I don’t do something else: while I’m terrified of other people, I also don’t trust myself to handle everything on my own, plus I’m poor & disabled & I can’t maintain at most jobs for long. The only way some version of this doesn’t happen is if the home-space feels at least as much “mine” as anybody else’s, if I feel belongingness to it as My Home & not just some place I’m staying. But when I do have that, there are often different problems, then, which I also do not know how to resolve.)(Also, living in cities feels difficult; so much around me at all times that I shut down to try to escape it. I seem to need a lot of open space around me in order to hear myself… but then usually there’s just a brief window where I’m relieved by the not-city needs being met but the anxiety hasn’t built up enough to wrench me yet.)
The post p.246 appeared first on I Roved Out in Search of Truth and Love.
Paranoia Girls: Page 40
Pictures: Yunico Uchiyama
Words: Patrick Macias
Translation / Coordination: Marie Iida
Paranoia Girls: Page 41
Pictures: Yunico Uchiyama
Words: Patrick Macias
Translation / Coordination: Marie Iida
Support Apollo on Patreon to read Enokan uncensored + 5 pages ahead of every public update!
(18+ Only. content warnings: nudity, teratophilia, sex, violence, gore, disturbing imagery, character death, swearing, drug use)
gRAB THE BUTTE
CH 02 / PG 58
Karl Schroeder (previously) is literally the most visionary person I know (and I've known him since 1986!): he was the first person to every mention "fractals" to me, then "the internet" and then "the web" -- there is no one, no one in my circle more ahead of more curves, and it shows in his novels and none moreso than Stealing Worlds, his latest, which is a futuristic roadmap to how our present-day politics, economics, technology and society.
Stealing Worlds is a near-future novel of ecological and economic catastrophe, in which an ever-larger pool of people have been replaced by automation and an ever-expanding proportion of our planet is becoming uninhabitable due to climate change. Mass surveillance has spread to the internet of things, and every corner of the world is now studded with sensors that monitor things like compliance with a too-late ban on fossil fuels (while simultaneously feeding into a tight mesh of surveillance of every living thing, including humans), and ubiquitous blockchain technology is used to create transparency for the powerless masses, revealing their debts and locations to bounty hunters.
Sura, the heroine of Stealing Worlds, is barely clinging to survival when her father -- an activist doing mysterious research in Peru -- is assassinated in an attack made to look like an accident. His friends warn Sura to go underground, to use the synthetic identity her paranoid father created and nurtured for her. His paranoia is finally vindicated -- but proves to be insufficient, as Sura is quickly snatched by an armed skip-tracer who hauls her off to be turned over to her father's killers, who have used her massive debts as a pretense for kidnapping her.
Sura escapes captivity and learns to go deeper underground, thanks to help from a clan of live-action role-players whose LARPs use the same blockchain infrastructure, cryptographically secured private mesh networks, and mixed-reality goggles to overlay fantastic worlds atop the world that Sura has been living in. These LARPs are more than just games: the open-source worlds that Sura dives into are becoming a fully parallel demi-monde, one in which favor-trading, quests, and real world logistics are creating a post-market-based form of cryptographically secured fully automated luxury communism (of a sort) right under the noses of the white supremacists, griefers, ICE agents, debt collectors and Ayn Rand-poisoned cultists who control the "real world."
The deeper Sura gets into the games, the more we learn about them, about their relationship to fully automated algorithmic corporations that earn money (of several kinds) by shorting polluters and wreckers, or by promoting collective responsibility. The mixed-reality world of the games is populated by inanimate objects that chatter with players, directing themselves to where they can do the most good, constantly solving and re-solving questions of efficient allocation without markets, in a world where they are at constant risk of arrests and violent retalitation from the forces of market reality.
It's simultaneously the weirdest and most plausible futuristic vision I've encountered in years, building on the world of Bruce Sterling's classic "Maneki Neko," Madeline Ashby's "Company Town," Charlie Stross's "Neptune's Brood," and my own novels like "Eastern Standard Tribe, "Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom" and "Walkaway" (attentive readers will find the book full of sly references to a wide range of novels that influenced Schroeder's thinking -- and of course, it's mutual, as I've been writing with Karl since I was a teenager).
Schroeder is also engaging with cutting-edge ideas from technology and economics: smart contracts and post-market allocation, making stunning new contributions to vital debates that have raged for more than a century.
Add to all that: this is a fucking great novel, full of amazing characters racing around fascinating settlings, doing battle, parkouring through surveillance grids, falling in love, betraying each other, snatching victory from the jaws of defeat. It's everything you could want from a Karl Schroeder novel, and it's the best Karl Schroeder novel ever (so far).
Stealing Worlds [Karl Schroeder/Tor]
Zephyr DearEverything about my chart continues to line up behind Venus (in Taurus) and Saturn (in Capricorn)
Looking at a natal chart can be rather overwhelming given the combination of the numerous planets, signs, houses and the aspects between placements. Astrologers have, over time, developed tricks to finding some key information in a chart without spending a ridiculous amount of time having to unearth it. One of these techniques is something I’ve picked up from Chris Brennan. Using the concepts of sects and benefics/malefics, you can easily pick out what planet will likely pose the most challenges for you as well as the planet that will give you the most blessings. This post will go into how exactly you can do that.
Sect, as defined by Deborah Houlding, is “division of the planets, signs and chart areas into the polarities of diurnal or nocturnal. The word itself represents division (as in section), but also implies unification within that division through affiliation and common interest (as in a religious sect).”
In traditional astrology, each of the planets were divided into diurnal (day) and nocturnal (night) planets.
Diurnal: The Sun, Jupiter and Saturn
Nocturnal: The Moon, Venus and Mars
No Affiliation (Changes depending on the individual chart): Mercury
As this is a concept pulled from traditional astrology, you don’t see the outer planets (Uranus, Neptune and Pluto) included.
In Hellenistic astrological tradition, the concept of sect could also be applied to individual charts. Based on the placement of the Sun in a chart, you could ascertain if the chart in question was a day chart or a night chart. If the Sun is above the ascendant/descendant axis in a chart, it’s a day chart. If it falls below the AC/DC axis, it’s a night chart. For a more in-depth description of this, I recommend Chris Brennan’s video on the topic.
If you’re confused on how to identify the ascendant, descendant axis, below you can see it highlighted in my chart.
As you can see, the ascendant/descendant axis functions as the horizon in a birth chart. If the Sun is above the horizon, you’re working with a day chart. You can see in my chart that this is the case. If it was below the horizon, it would be a night chart.
In general, diurnal planets are more favorable when placed in a day chart and nocturnal planets are more favorable when placed in a night chart. Since I have a day chart, we can revisit the list of diurnal planets and see that the Sun, Jupiter and Saturn are at home in my chart because of its sect.
This distinction is the foundation for how we’ll identify the most positive and negative planets in the chart, but before we can identify them, we have to talk about another concept from traditional astrology: benefics and malefics.
Along with being divided into the sects, there were traditionally planets that could be labeled as benefics or malefics. In short, benefics have a positive impact within the chart and malefics have a more challenging impact within the chart.
Benefics, as defined by Deborah Houlding, are “planets that assist in a positive outcome.” These include Jupiter and Venus and “offer benefits and protection.” The North Node can also be considered a benefic.
Malefics, as defined by Deborah Houlding, are “planets that naturally symbolise damage and loss.” Traditionally, this included Mars and Saturn. The South Node and the outer planets (Uranus, Neptune and Pluto) could also be interpreted as malefic in modern astrology.
Now that we have the foundation laid out, we can get to the juicy part. Which planet is going to give you the most trouble? Which will be blessing your chart with its gifts? To find the answers to this, we simply combine what we know of day/night charts and the benefics/malefics.
In a day chart, the most beneficial planet is going to be the benefic that is in the diurnal sect. This would be Jupiter. The most challenging planet in a day chart is going to be the malefic in the nocturnal sect, because this planet is not just malefic but doesn’t have the advantage of being in its own sect. This is Mars.
To break it down:
Most Benefic: Jupiter
Most Malefic: Mars
Most Benefic: Venus
Most Malefic: Saturn
Saturn has a bit of reputation in the astrological community, even among those who are only familiar with Sun signs, because of the mainstream discussion around Saturn returns. Saturn is seen as a punishing, challenging figure. In a day chart, however, Saturn may have a more beneficial effect. It’s still not going to be the gentlest of energies, but those with a day chart may struggle less with it’s challenges and find them fulfilling – especially after they’ve reached their first Saturn return as briefly discussed in this episode of the Astrology Podcast.
That’s all for today’s discussion of this technique! Keep in mind that there are other mitigating factors for how positive and negative a planet will be in a chart, but this is a quick and easy technique to help you see where positive and negative energy may be focused. As mentioned before, I picked this up from Chris Brennan and highly recommend checking out all he has to offer on astrology (The Astrology Dictionary, The Astrology Podcast, The Astrology School, and his book: Hellenistic Astrology: The Study of Fate and Fortune) if you’re looking to learn more about astrology.
The 2020 presidential election is an election with everything on the line for the United States. Four years of Trump is a national disaster. Eight years is a confirmation that it was no fluke. It embeds his degenerate style of government in the fabric of the Republic for the future. For those of us who believe in civic republicanism and a liberal future, no stone can be left unturned to ensure his defeat. It’s not just that the stakes are so high. He has big advantages in the electoral college. Incumbents usually get reelected. And let’s be frank: he already did once what many of us thought was all but impossible.
But we’d be lying to ourselves if we didn’t recognize another possible scenario, one which a lot of the factual evidence suggests is not at all unlikely. That is that Trump is a historically unpopular president; he routinely polls over 50 percent of the voting population saying they will definitely vote against his reelection; and he is likely to be crushed in his bid for reelection in 18 months.
Is all of this wishful thinking? Again, I’m not saying it will happen. I’m saying it’s a pretty plausible scenario. It’s probably best that no one who recognizes the importance of Trump’s defeat even thinks about it frankly. Assume you’re behind. But just between you and me, let’s briefly go through it.
Start with the most obvious fact: President Trump is the most consistently unpopular President in at least a century. He has not had a net positive approval rating for his entire presidency and has durably had approval ratings in the low 40s, sometimes dipping down into the 30s.The consistency of his unpopularity rather than its depth is what sets him apart. Other presidents have been that low and even gone on to win reelection. None has been that low for his entire presidency. That suggests a strong ceiling he cannot get above. For any other President we’d recognize this as a massive reelection warning sign. It’s really no different or shouldn’t be any different with President Trump.
The intensity of opposition is even more telling. Polls routinely show that well over 50% of voters say they will definitely not vote for him for reelection. A Quinnipiac poll from a week ago found that Trump had a 41% approval rating while 57% disapproved of him. More significantly 54% said they would “definitely” not vote to reelect him. A January Marist poll had the number of definite nos at 57%.
Could people change their minds? Of course. But this is a measure of the steepness of the climb. Trump needs to get all the undecideds and then peel off a significant number who say there’s no way they’d ever vote for him. That’s hard.
These are again, massive warning signs for reelection defeat.
Of course we know from bitter experience that a Republican President can lose the popular vote by a significant margin and still be elected President. But they can’t lose by that much. Maybe it’s 2 or 3 percentage points max to lose the popular vote and win the electoral college. But not more than that.
Here’s another way to look at it. President Trump won the 2016 election by sweeping most of the Bush/Obama era swing states and pulling off narrow surprise victories in Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin. In a more realist scenario, I suspect the entire election probably comes down to who wins Wisconsin. I’m not sure there’s been any public 2020 polls there yet. But we should remember that Scott Walker came really, really close to winning reelection even at the height of the 2018 wave. So Wisconsin is the nut Democrats need to crack and they need to put everything into it. There’s been a decent amount of public polling in Michigan and Pennsylvania though. The results for Trump are dismal. Trump is down by upwards of 10 points in Pennsylvania against Biden and Sanders. Michigan is about the same. If Trump loses these two states and Wisconsin he’s almost certainly done.
Then there’s red states. As you likely heard, Quinnipiac had a poll out this week showing Joe Biden beating President Trump by 4 percentage points in Texas. Biden was the only Democratic candidate to best Trump in the poll. The rest of the other top five candidates were just behind Trump with thin margin of error deficits. The headline here isn’t really Biden. His being a significant notch ahead of the other candidates is a pattern we see in virtually every poll. That may persist or not. The real headline here is that at least on the basis of this poll Trump will have to fight hard for Texas, which again suggests he could be on track for a crushing defeat.
Is this just an outlier poll? Not necessarily. An Emerson poll from a month earlier only had Trump doing a bit better. Biden was winning by 1 percentage point. Sanders losing by 2, Warren losing by 6 and so forth. Same basic picture. Trump has a fight on his hands in Texas.
Big red pulsing reelection warning sign.
We have very thin statewide polling at this point in the cycle. Like I said, I couldn’t even find a single poll of Wisconsin, which I suspect will be the pivotal state. And quite a lot can change in 18 months. But at least for right now statewide polls in critical states almost all show Trump behind. Arizona, the single pollster has Biden up by 5. Iowa, Biden up by 6. North Carolina, Biden by 12. Ohio hasn’t been polled since November, just after the midterm. That most recent poll had Biden up by 4. Interestingly, the best number I found for Trump in any semi-swingable state was Florida where the most recent poll had him tied with Biden. Given that Republicans won the governorship and the Senate seat last November, amidst a blue wave, it’s a pretty open question whether Florida is really any longer a swing state.
(I’m not trying to prejudice the primary question by mostly citing Biden’s numbers. It just provides a simple baseline apples to apples comparison. Usually Sanders is a bit weaker versus Trump and the remaining top three (Harris, Warren and Buttigieg) are a few points weaker. Whether this consistent spread changes over time we’ll have to wait to see.)
In what seemed like going on offense but actually betrayed the weakness of his position, Trump’s campaign just announced their intent to target New Hampshire, New Mexico and Nevada to ‘expand the map’ for 2020. New Hampshire is a perennially close run thing: I don’t think Trump will win there. But he could. New Mexico and Nevada are purely aspirational targets for Trump and that’s generous. Even his campaign, always full of bombast and chest thumping, seems to recognize it needs a new plan with most of the industrial midwest turning against him.
Some people say, well, look what happened with the polls in 2016! The polls don’t matter. Not really. The vast majority of what we’re talking about with ‘the polls’ for 2016 were the national horse race numbers. Consider one example. The final RCP average in 2016 had Clinton winning the national popular vote by 3.2%. She won it by 2.1%. Polls can be wrong. But they’re usually pretty close to predicting the result, especially when you average them out. In 2016 they were actually quite close to the mark, though they very slightly understated Trump’s strength.
Let me repeat. I’m definitely not saying all these polls will be predictive of the final numbers in November 2020. I certainly don’t want anyone to rely on that outcome – much better to consider these numbers for 15 or 20 minutes and then forget you ever read this post. As noted above, Trump has a number of advantages in his favor while the consequences of his possible reelection are so catastrophic that everything must be done to prevent it. But the constant repetition of the idea that Trump can be a complete maniac and buffoon but none of it matters because of the electoral college or other magic powers becomes at a certain point enervating and demoralizing for those who see the danger he represents and the necessity of his electoral repudiation. There’s little evidence to back it up. The truth is that we’ve all been collectively traumatized by the events of the last four years. Our judgment and perceptions are a bit off.
Personally, even I don’t really buy it. I assume it will be a tight race and the winner of Wisconsin will be the next President. But sometimes it makes sense to step back and look at data, albeit imperfect, which is separate from our hopes and fears. It’s like what pilots are trained to do in stormy weather or difficult flying conditions: ignore what you feel or see and just watch the instruments. The best summary is this. If you look at these numbers and set aside the name Trump and all the aura – negative and positive – that surrounds him, you would say the electoral beatdown scenario is significantly more likely than even a narrow victory for the President.
For now, forget I said any of this and focus on ending the Trump presidency. But keep it somewhere in the back of your mind because it’s probably true.
The State Department has rejected at least four U.S. embassies’ requests to fly the rainbow pride flag on their official flagpoles during the month of June, NBC News reported.
Three U.S. diplomats told NBC that embassies in Israel, Germany, Brazil and Latvia were denied requests to fly the flag. The rainbow pride flag can reportedly be hung in other spaces around the embassy, but not on the pole alongside the American flag.
The denials are reportedly coming from State Department’s undersecretary for management’s office, according to NBC.
The Trump administration has made significant moves to dismantle LGBT rights since he took office, most notably when Trump announced via Twitter his ban on transgender people serving in the military.
The move contrasts not only with President Trump’s recently announced effort to decriminalize homosexuality across the globe, but also with the purported values his campaign is raising money off of. The official Trump merchandise store has rainbow Make American Great Again t-shirts for sale for pride month.
“Suicidal feelings are not the same as giving up on life. Suicidal feelings often express a powerful and overwhelming need for a different life. Suicidal feelings can mean, in a desperate and unyielding way, a demand for something new. Listen to someone who is suicidal and you often hear a need for change so important, so indispensable, that they would rather die than go on living without the change. And when the person feels powerless to make that change happen, they become suicidal. Help comes when the person identifies the change they want and starts to believe it can actually happen. Whether it is overcoming an impossible family situation, making a career or study change, standing up to an oppressor, gaining relief from chronic physical pain, igniting creative inspiration, feeling less alone, or beginning to value their self worth, at the root of suicidal feelings is often powerlessness to change your life – not giving up on life itself.”— Will Hall, Living with suicidal feelings
“Traumatized people are often afraid of feeling. It is not so much the perpetrators (who, hopefully, are no longer around to hurt them) but their own physical sensations that now are the enemy. Apprehension about being hijacked by uncomfortable sensations keeps the body frozen and the mind shut. Even though the trauma is a thing of the past, the emotional brain keeps generating sensations that make the sufferer feel scared and helpless. It’s not surprising that so many trauma survivors are compulsive eaters and drinkers, fear making love, and avoid many social activities: Their sensory world is largely off limits.”— - Bessel van der Kolk “The Body Keeps the Score: Brain, Mind, and the Body in the Healing of Trauma
Kids is a new $3 video game that "allows you to move with and against crowds until everyone is gone."
Here's a review on iTunes from KupaMan:
This is a weird game. The combination of smooth animation, crowd mechanics, and spartan audio make for a weird, satisfying experience. It’s sometimes amusing, sort of gross, and a little unnerving. There’s no puzzles or scores, just a series of interactions. These repeat themselves in similar ways over the course of the short game, which is a little disappointing. This isn’t for everybody, but if the trailer looks appealing to you, you will probably find something to like about Kids.
Children growing up in abuse always keep asking themselves just why their parents hate them so much? What have they done to deserve it? What is so horrible about them that they would deserve this level of hatred? And abusive parents supply answers daily, you’re a financial burden, you need food and clothes and attention, you sometimes don’t do things exactly how they want, you don’t deliver parent’s expectations, and on top of that, they insist there’s something so unlovable, despicable and disgusting inside of you, that nobody could possibly love you.
This breaks children’s spirit. Because we as children, we all have no choice but to love our parents. We love them even as they hate us. And we do everything in our power to stop them from hating us so much. We lower our wants and needs, until we’re barely any burden at all. We don’t ask for new clothing or new stuff anymore, we make do, we try to work off whatever money parents spend on us, we don’t ask for attention anymore, even when we really need it. We try our hardest to meet parent’s expectations, we push ourselves in everything so hard we end up breaking our spirits. Every single mistake means we deserved more hatred. Every “less than perfect” result causes us to break down because again, it means we deserve the hatred and punishment, because once again we are worthless in our parents’ eyes.
And nothing works, even as our parents insist it’s because of our own faults and selfishness and demands that they hate us, even as we bring it to a minimum, even as we give up everything we’re entitled to have in a family, the hatred doesn’t go away. We come home and parets we worked so hard to please look us in contempt, lash out at us, act as if everything would be better if only we didn’t exist. How is a child supposed to go on? We know we can’t survive without our parents, we know we need to be accepted as a part of the family in order to have a place in our community, in order to be safe, to have a future. And our parents, people who are supposed to accept us, who are supposed to know us the best, because they’ve known us for our entire lives, they say no, you don’t belong anywhere, you’re not wanted anywhere, this world doesn’t need or want anyone like you.
It’s not a wonder we all end up growing up terrified we can’t be loved, that we’ll never be a part of anything. Even rejection and abandonment from friends and partners are huge blows for us, because it’s not about “not getting what we want”, it’s proof that our parents were right, that we can never deserve to be loved. It makes life miserable and terrifying for us. Being singled out as one human who cannot be redeemed, who cannot deserve a place in someone’s heart, and being told over and over again there’s something deep inside of us that is wrong and selfish, and justifies all the abuse done to us, it’s torture. We’re set up as children, to keep going thru torture for rest of our lives, because our parents didn’t have the decency to sit down, and admit the problem was never in us. It’s them who didn’t have a capacitiy to give us a loving home. It’s them who took advantage of a child who had nowhere else to go, and force them into life of hatred and abuse. It’s them who watched a child struggle with unbearably painful concept of themselves being unlovable, when they did nothing wrong, nothing to deserve it, nothing that would justify them being denied of warmth, acceptance and love. It’s them who let that child suffer, and felt nothing. It’s them who caused the suffering, and could have stopped it, but they didn’t. They benefited of it. They made sure it continued. They made sure all of their faults were hidden, and instead had a child believe there was no place for them in the world.
You try to tell me they’re not monsters. You just try to tell me there’s a child in the world who deserved this.
Lady Inamorata makes me feel like walking through a wall of butterflies and out into a perspective universe of bliss, as far as “the experience” goes. She enjoyed this description, and I feel like just writing it a hundred times over and better.
This feels like more my actual self than the self that walks around all day. I enjoy both aspects of me, but Lady Inamorata brings this heightened sensation and awareness that helps send me deep and focused; like Her presence itself slips off my everything but the inner joy of release that is beyond the body’s material.
And open, honest communication easily has already put in place to the level of comfort we both desire. We both agree that, as for the first encounter, my future as Her devotee was set and predestined. As in, it took no special effort to trust and go into trance for Lady Inamorata, that things always felt natural and easy to talk about.
Several sessions and chats always left me feeling “buzzed”and vibrant. Needing Lady Inamorata’s voice is a personal enjoyment. She is happy with the choice, and I get to feel pleasure from the choice and reminders in every video/session. Which I do by my own volition and submission; listening to Her files reinforces the control I crave/want/need.
Every personal session is unique with Lady Inamorata. She calms me, for I am always excited, and we do a guided breathing. One session was a fantasy I’ve always had and She naturally knew how to call on it. Succubus, then Queen, then Goddess; Lady Inamorata brought out submissiveness in me in every way. She is always enjoying my begging and pleading for more interactions.
It puts a perspective on paths whenever I think about these experiences, and how they cross. This powerful, loving woman wants to completely enchant and enthrall my submissive side. It’s always more -much more- than I ever hope for. Each session or video, it is always simply a step into the vast comfort and relaxation which meditation is famously known for. And I could meditate, but Her voice does more than simply enable or motivate. She says a thing, and I get to absorb and revel in it being the new perspective or sensation thought of my day.
We are not pushing a dozen boundaries. She wields control decisively, in a way, that is like strings that will pull and make a happy wolf out of me. Each day I am hoping for something explicit to pop in to my head that brings the best smile to Her face. Instead, I enjoy things being easy and natural as She will tell me when and how much Lady Inamorata wants something.
Currently, I dream about Lady Inamorata, could go deep for Her at practically any moment, enjoy falling into trance at any moment with Her in my mind as if to a quiet peaceful place; like writing a few of these thoughts and some perspective dreams I may have of Lady Inamorata.
© E. Slav
Science writer Leigh Phillips's 2016 book Austerity Ecology and the Collapse-Porn Addicts was one of the most important, angry and inspiring books I read that year, a passionate argument for a high-tech just and sustainable world that celebrated materialism and comfort, rather than calling for a return to a world of three billion people scratching potatoes in the dirt; so when Phillips sent me a manuscript for his new book, The People's Republic of Walmart: How the World's Biggest Corporations are Laying the Foundation for Socialism last year, I dropped everything and read it, and I haven't stopped thinking about it since.
Phillips and his co-author, Canadian labour organiser Michal Rozworski, have outdone themselves with this volume.
The two are addressing themselves to the socialist calculation debate, which raged through Austrian economic circles a century ago, with market-focused economists like Ludwig von Mises arguing that it was technically impossible to calculate an efficient allocation of goods in a large, industrial society, and that markets alone -- as a kind of distributed calculation engine -- could solve the problem of getting goods to the people who could make best use of them.
Von Mises won the argument in the 1920s, but a funny thing happened on the way to the 2020s: we are now surrounded by companies and organisations that are as large or larger than the USSR at its apex, which undertake breathtakingly efficient allocations of goods and resources, and all without markets, running as command economies.
You've heard of these bigger-than-the-Soviet-Union command economies: Amazon. Walmart. The Pentagon. There are many more. Each one is an existence-proof of the idea that markets are not needed for mass-scale allocation. What's more, the counterexamples, like Sears -- which implemented internal markets at the insistence of an ideology-blinded libertarian CEO -- show that markets are much worse at allocating resources than the computational command economies used in other enterprises.
The upshot of this is that to the extent that the Soviet Union was crippled by inefficient allocation, that is no longer the problem it once once. It's that we can imagine something as efficient and convenient as Walmart or Amazon without CEOs, shareholders or exploited workers, bringing all the bounties of late-stage capitalism without its pathologies.
The upshot is that fully automated luxury communism isn't just science fiction: it's a going concern with real evidence on the ground.
Market purists argue that we must tolerate all the evils of markets -- exploitation, inequality, the endangering of our biosphere -- because markets are the only conceivable force that can accomplish efficient allocation in our highly technical world. Deep greens take them at their word and say, fine, let's get rid of technology and return to a kind of agrarian feudalism.
Both of them are buying into Thatcher's maxim that "there is no alternative." But Phillips and Rozworksi are proposing an alternative: bright green, high-tech societies where markets are useful tools for solving the odd problem, but where allocation is primarily accomplished by the preferred means of Jeff Bezos and Sam Walton, but to the benefit of the many, not the few.
It's an audacious and exciting vision, an excellent companion to other Jacobin books like Four Futures, the kind of thing with the power to start a new movement.
Highly recommended.
The People's Republic of Walmart: How the World's Biggest Corporations are Laying the Foundation for Socialism [Leigh Phillips and Michal Rozworski/Verso (Jacobin)]
The latest CatFoxWolf comic, Lost, is finally finished.
Thank you so much to everyone who stuck with the story as it developed over the months and years. I was experimenting a lot with tone and style and had to feel my way through the story as I went along. There was no fixed script when I started and I tried really hard to trust my instincts about where I felt it should go, and not to overthink how people would react. But the feedback I’ve gotten has been overwhelmingly kind and supportive, and I’m really glad people have enjoyed it or taken something from the story.
If you’re new to the comic, the images above are just a bunch of pages taken out of context and will make absolutely no sense ha ha but you can read the whole thing on http://www.catfoxwolf.com/lost.html or better yet, download it here.
Buy Lost (120+ page PDF) for $9 on Gumroad
Republican Iowa Gov. Kim Reynolds is looking to roll back the state’s ban on felon voting, she announced this week. Iowa is one of three states with constitutions that permanently ban convicted felons from voting unless the governor choses to restore the felon’s franchise. Reynolds proposed in her Condition of the State speech a constitutional amendment, which would need to go through the legislature, to change the current system, though the details of the proposal are still unclear. More than 50,000 Iowans can’t vote due to the current ban.
Trump’s Justice Department is reversing its posture on a key issue in the ongoing litigation over Texas’ legislative maps, which had been found racially discriminatory in the courts. The challengers in the case, backed by Obama’s DOJ, had sought to require Texas to get federal approval for all maps that it drew, which it previously needed to do under the so-called pre-clearance provision of the Voting Rights Act. In court filings last week, the Trump administration indicated it wanted to switch that position, and side with the state in its fight against being put under pre-clearance.
A federal judge in Wisconsin on Thursday blocked cutbacks to early voting and other voting restrictions that the states’ GOP lawmakers passed in a lame-duck session before Democratic Gov. Tony Evers took office. Republicans had sought to limit early voting to two weeks in the state. They also sought to put additional limits on the types of IDs that could be used to vote. U.S. District Judge James Peterson ruled that the early voting reductions were a violation of an order he handed down in 2016 that blocked the state from cutting early voting in ways similar to what he ruled against then. That 2016 decision also blocked the ID restrictions that Republicans passed again late last year.
Michigan Secretary of State Jocelyn Benson wants to settle a federal lawsuit challenging the state’s legislative maps as unconstitutionally gerrymandered to benefit Republicans. Benson, a Democrat, said that she hoped to “ensure a fair and equitable resolution” of the matter, allowing new congressional and state Senate districts to be drawn prior to the 2020 election. The Michigan Republican Party accused Benson of trying to obtain a “secret consent decree” to “draw new district lines designed to benefit Democratic candidates.”
A federal judge in Manhattan ruled on Tuesday that the administration’s effort to add a citizenship question to the Census was illegal, and, on Friday, the Supreme Court canceled arguments on what evidence could be used in the case, originally scheduled in February. The administration appealed to the 2nd Circuit Court of Appeals, and is also likely to ask the Supreme Court to weigh in before June, before the Census printing deadline.
Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. was born on Jan. 15, 1929. Tomorrow is the national holiday that celebrates his birthday and his life. There are a number of ways to observe the day: attending speeches, volunteer work, a trip to local civil rights museum. But conservatives like to mark the occasion by aggravating African-Americans and people who support the the struggle for civil rights by being dumbshits.
Take Jeff Jacoby, conservative opinion writer for the Boston Globe. Please. On Jan. 18 of this year the Globe published “As MLK foresaw, racism in America has been largely overcome:”
“It is a commonplace that racism is America’s original sin. Hardly a day goes by without attention being focused on instances of the racial injustice, friction, and double standards that can still be found in this nation. Open the morning paper or watch cable news, and there will be something to remind you of the country’s racial tensions — from controversy over flying the Confederate flag to NFL players protesting police brutality, from accusations of voter suppression in Georgia to an Iowa congressman defending “white nationalism.” It isn’t surprising that when Americans are asked in opinion polls whether race relations are getting better, many of them — sometimes most of them — gloomily reply that racism is still a major problem.
But it isn’t. It is only a minor problem now, one that has grown steadily less toxic and less entrenched. King predicted confidently that America would surmount its benighted racial past, and his confidence was not misplaced. Though his own life was cut short by a racist assassin, he foresaw that racism would lose its grip on American life.”
Racism is practically over! is a favorite refrain of whites who want people to be quiet about racism. They will make this claim no matter what is actually happening in the world outside of their narrow little minds. Again, this article was published two days ago, even though we’re into a full month of a government shutdown because the racist republican kumquat wants $6 billion for an immigrant-excluding wall. Jacoby refers to the “coarse racial crudeness of the incumbent president” but very carefully doesn’t examine how someone who is coarse and crude in a racial way got into the White House.
As is usually the case, Jacoby supports his claim that racism is practically over for a given value of racism and over! by citing The Bad Old Days. In the Bad Old Days white people were much more likely to express racist attitudes. But now they’re not.
In 1958, 48 percent of white Americans polled by Gallup said that “if colored people came to live next door,” they would be likely to move. By 1978, only 13 percent still said that; by 1997, the proportion had fallen to 1 percent.
Problem solved? Only if you’re the sort of person who thinks whites being less likely to express racist attitudes to a pollster means racism is on the wane.
Thirty-eight percent of white respondents said they would leave one of the integrated neighborhoods, with Detroiters and those endorsing negative racial stereotypes especially likely to do so. When asked why they might leave, whites focused on the negative features of integrated neighborhoods. Expressions of racial prejudice were also common, but neutral ethnocentrism rare.
The author of that study — Maria Kyrsan — was quoted extensively in an Vox article about white self-segregation in the U.S.
Jacoby also cites white attitudes about interracial marriage and friendship as proof. And to make sure exactly how serious everyone knows to take him, he pulls a double Goldberg: Citing and writing like Jonah Goldberg.
In 1964, a mere 18 percent of white Americans claimed to have a friend who was black. Four decades later, Gallup found that the proportion of interracial friendships had more than quadrupled: 82 percent of whites said they had close nonwhite friends (and 88 percent of blacks reported having close friends who were not black). Perhaps some white respondents were fibbing to appear more enlightened. But as commentator Jonah Goldberg observes, “the mere fact that they wanted others to believe they had a black friend is a kind of progress.”
Because nothing says respect like using imaginary African-Americans and other people of color to prove you’re a good person.
I’m sure there are a lot more Jacobyish articles out there. I assume they’re not unlike the articles that conservative pundits crank out every year at this time of year. But it isn’t just pundits. Politicians like to get in on the act as well. Here’s Vice President Pence.
Pence said administration officials have been speaking with rank and file Democrats in order to get a deal done, though he wouldn’t name those Democrats. He did, however, drop King’s name as someone whose message could inspire the two sides to come together.
“The hearts and minds of the American people today are thinking a lot about it being the weekend we are remembering the life and the work of Rev. Martin Luther King Jr.,” Pence told host Margaret Brennan. “One of my favorite quotes from Dr. King was, ‘Now is the time to make real the promises of democracy.’ You think of how he changed America, he inspired us to change through the legislative process.”
That’s one reason Republicans have been busily disenfranchising African-Americans.
Pence’s use of a few words from King’s speech to push his party’s xenophobic policies is a pitch-perfect trolling. Everyone knows that the GOP is the party of racism, a group that it wants to undo all of his work except for a few of his words stripped of meaning and context. And people like Jacoby can point to the fact that someone like Pence still quotes King and say, racism is practically over!
Europeiska unionen är nära att ge ännu mer makt till ett fåtal stora amerikanska IT-företag, i utbyte mot tillfälliga vinstdelningsarrangemang med en handfull europeiska underhållningsföretag — med masscensur och en ännu svagare förhandlingsposition för verksamma europeiska artister som följd.
Det har gått mer än fyra månader sedan EU-parlamentets förhandlare och företrädare för Europas nationella regeringar försvann bakom stängda dörrar för att göra det nya direktivet om upphovsrätt på den digitala inre marknaden redo för omröstning. Trots all denna tid i ensamhet har de inte lyckats.
Direktivet har samma problem som det haft från början:
I båda fallen kan EU-förslagen resultera i en del mindre utbetalningar från Amerikas Big Tech-företag till Europas upphovsrättsindustrier — tyska tidningsfamiljer, EU-divisionerna hos globala skivbolag — men till ett fruktansvärt pris.
Ta Artikel 11: regeln låter tidningar bestämma vem som kan länka till dem, och låter dem debitera vad de tror att marknaden klarar av för dessa länkar. Även om det är osannolikt att Europas nyhetsjättar kommer att förbjuda varandra att länka till varandras artiklar kan samma sak inte sägas om relationen mellan etablerade nyhetsjättar och nystartad, kritisk press. Liten, oberoende press kan blockeras helt och hållet från att länka till etablerade nyhetskällor — även då syftet är kritik och kommentar — eller så kan de debiteras en mycket högre kostnad än sina mainstream-motsvarigheter.
Och medan Google och Facebook kommer att beklaga förlusten av några miljoner euro som de lärbehöva betala till stora nyhetstjänster är det ingenting jämfört med den långsiktiga fördelen för IT-jättar att aldrig behöva oroa sig för att nystartade Made-in-EU-företag växer och utmanar dem. Dessa småspelare har inte de miljoner att spendera som amerikansk Big Tech har.
Artikel 11 drabbar den oberoende sektorn från två håll: inte bara kommer de att behöva betala för att länka till mainstream-press; de får inte heller låta andra fritt länka till de egna nyheterna. Reglerna satta av Artikel 11 anger att nyhetswebbplatser som är allmännyttiga, crowdfundade, open-access eller Creative Commons-licensierade inte längre får låta vem som helst länka till dem: i stället måste de förhandla fram en länkningslicens med varje kommersiell webbplats och samla in avgifter i vartenda fall.
Artikel 13 är ännu värre. Även om det nuvarande utkastet säger att "filter bör undvikas" är det också utformat för att garantera att filter kommer att krävas. De senaste tre månaderna har ägnats åt att lägga till en lång lista med ogenomträngliga, motsägande och osammanhängande klausuler som insisterar att någon teoretiskt perfekt teknik för filtrera hundratals miljarder kommunikationer och dela upp dem i "överträdelse" och "ej överträdelse" kan bli till genom lagstiftning (det kan den inte).
Att bygga Artikel 13:s filter kommer sannolikt att kosta hundratals miljoner euro, en kostnad som bara de största amerikanska företagen har råd med, och som inga av Europas företag kan bära. Undantaget som låter företag med mindre än 20 miljoner euro i årsomsättning undvika filtren är irrelevant: om dessa företag ska utmana jättarna i USA måste de växa, och de kan inte växa sig större än 20 miljoner euro-företag om det innebär att de måste hitta hundratals miljoner euro för att följa Artikel 13.
EU säljer Big Tech en väldigt billig garanti för fortsatt internetdominans. Utan konkurrens från nya aktörer behöver de bara vara rädda för varandra.
Samtidigt kommer deras makt växa då antalet teknikföretag som kontrollerar internetåtkomst krymper. Möjligheten för oberoende artister och produktionsbolag att förhandla fram rättvisa avtal kommer att stadigt försämras, vilket låter Big Tech och de stora underhållningsföretagen kontrollera en allt större del av produkten av skaparnas arbete.
Naturligtvis är de allra flesta européer inte i underhållningsindustrin och bara en liten minoritet av internets användningsområden är underhållningsrelaterade. Artikel 13 kommer att hålla internetanvändningen hos 500 miljoner européer gisslan i ett tanklöst system för att krama ut små vinster för artisters levebröd, och samtidigt kommer censurfiltren i Artikel 13 spotta ut samma meningslösa, felbenägna omdömen som kommit att vara typiska för algoritmisk diskriminering det här århundradet.
Det är inte för sent: Europeiska rådet — som består av företrädare från EU-medlemsstater som Sverige — kommer snart att rösta om direktivet. Deras beslut kommer att forma framtiden för internet, kanske för flera generationer framåt. Vi behöver få svenskar att agera och lägga tryck på sina politiker att utdela ett slag för rättvisa och mot marknadskoncentration och censur.
Sześć lat temu Polacy wyszli na ulice by uratować Europę przed ACTA – międzynarodową umową handlową, negocjowaną z inicjatywy Stanów Zjednoczonych, która groziła wprowadzeniem szeroko zakrojonej cenzury i nadzoru w Internecie w imię rzekomej ochrony praw autorskich.
Dziś Polacy znów są w centrum uwagi, walcząc z “ACTA2”: Dyrektywą w sprawie praw autorskich na jednolitym rynku cyfrowym. Wasza pomoc nigdy nie była bardziej potrzebna!
W tym miesiącu Unia Europejska wynegocjuje najnowszy (i zapewne ostateczny) kształt projektu Dyrektywy. Ku naszemu rozczarowaniu – aczkolwiek nie zaskoczeniu! – żaden z problematycznych zapisów (prowadzących do większej cenzury i koncentracji rynku niż nawet w przypadku ACTA) nie został poprawiony. Przeciwnie, zapisy te stały się pod wieloma względami gorsze.
Unia Europejska i jej państwa członkowskie negocjowały Dyrektywę od września, jednak nie znalazły żadnego sposobu poprawienia jej dwóch kontrowersyjnych zapisów:
(Prawie) wszyscy są przeciwni tym pomysłom. Nie tylko cztery miliony Europejczyków, którzy podpisali petycję sprzeciwiającą się Dyrektywie w jej obecnej formie; również największe Europejskie studia filmowe i ligi sportowe, jak i najbardziej znani Internetowi specjaliści, w tym „ojciec Internetu” Vint Cerf, i wynalazca WWW Sir Tim Berners-Lee.
Mimo to, UE i negocjatorzy z krajów członkowskich nie byli w stanie znaleźć żadnego lepszego rozwiązania. Obecna wersja nadal rozwiązuje żadnego z poważnych problemów związanych z Artykułem 11, Podatkiem od Linkowania; nie zawiera nawet adekwatnych definicji terminów użytych w tym zapisie. Nowy Artykuł 13 jest w praktyce identyczny do swojej poprzedniej wersji, nie pomogło tu dodanie listy niejasnych, sprzecznych, niespójnych zapisów sugerujących, że jakaś teoretycznie idealna technologia, mogąca sortować setki miliardów aktów komunikacji na „naruszające prawa autorskie” i „nienaruszające praw autorskich”, może zostać stworzona aktem prawnym (nie może).
Czas na działanie Polski! To rzadki moment, w którym prawa i lewa strona sceny politycznej może się zgodzić co do jednego: nie ma zgody na narzucenie ACTA2 Europejczykom, którzy nie mają na to najmniejszej ochoty.
Swiss freeskier and filmmaker Nico Vuignier of Centriphone fame, delivers "Heatseeker," an exhilarating night skiing adventure illuminated by fiery shots from a flare gun.
Edited by Nicolas Vuignier & Jules Guarneri; Shot by Jules Guarneri; Riders: Jeremie Heitz, Nicolas Vuignier, Samuel Anthamatten, Laurent DeMartin, Florian Bruchez, Mathieu Schaer
Aloha, Office Participant! This is the second to last installment of the Bureau series. Today has you pondering life's meaning.
Meditation is a helpful way to consider our role in the world and find deeper connections and ideas. Regrettably, the modern world is very loud and tangentially distracting, particularly with notification-driven devices. A long attention span to properly meditate can be very difficult to achieve.
Let's begin by pressing play to enjoy some kaleidoscopic peace of mind:
Here at The Bureau, we recommend not fighting these electronic influences (we have to live in the time we live in) but instead suggest embracing technology with mind-expanding functions.
A benefit of these tools is the occasional lucid dream or unexpected hallucination. (Or a desired hallucination) - And once you train your mind to be receptive to these tools you can dial up a mental state as easily as you do with an episode of TV on a streaming service.
The idea of using technology to induce meditative states is, of course, not new. Some suggest drumming was first implemented for its trance-inducing qualities. The use of stroboscopic sound was discussed in Bureau #9 with SBaGEN and binaural audio. Here is a follow-up to that post, expanding your tools into hardware.
1) The Buddha Machine
The Buddha Machine is a small plastic box, resembling a transistor radio, that plays meditative music and other looping phrases. It's this basic simplicity that provides a relaxing comfortable mood. (Throbbing Gristle has a customized edition, as does Philip Glass) It's recently been reissued:
I love this mix of Buddha Machine music:
Trippy:
David has discussed these great boxes a few times here.
2) Brion Gysin's Dreamachine (or Dream Machine)
Gysin's original notes: http://www.noah.org/science/dreamachine/
Instructions: Print out a template
Easily the one piece of trance hardware that has the most devoted following and cult of recognition is Gysin's rotating cardboard-based strobe tool, "The Dreamachine" — Its origins are quite beautiful, however, describing a moment of strobing light from trees as Gysin road in a bus in 1958:
Had a transcendental storm of colour visions today in the bus going to Marseilles. We ran through a long avenue of trees and I closed my eyes against the setting sun. An overwhelming flood of intensely bright colors exploded behind my eyelids: a multidimensional kaleidoscope whirling out through space. I was swept out of time. I was out in a world of infinite number. The vision stopped abruptly as we left the trees. Was that a vision? What happened to me?
Make your own Dream Machine
To create a Dream Machine, you just need a large printout of this useful PDF file. If you have access to an Opaque Projector (many high schools and colleges have these for you to borrow if you're affiliated), this can be even easier, as you can project the template onto cardstock to trace it out.
To make the Dream Machine spin, you need a suspended lightbulb and a 78rpm turntable. This is easier to find today with the current resurgence of record players, but be sure to check if yours plays 78rpm (not just 45rpm or 33rpm) - I've used a Vestax Handy Trax to great effect.
(Avoid a fire: Be careful with placement of an incandescent lightbulb to not be in contact with the paper, and be mindful that the paper might change orientation or tilt into the bulb while spinning, or use an LED bulb)
Our modern age has a few excellent Dream Machine emulators which you can view and customize directly on your web browser:
Dream Machine Emulator #1
Dream Machine Emulator #2
Much can be found about Dream Machines from previous Boing Boing posts. — Regards again to David for those.
3) Mitch Altman's Brain Machine
On the other spectrum of this kind of hardware is more aggressive pieces that feel more like a component for future Body-Computer Interfaces or something left out of Statik Institution of Retention. (GREAT game, btw) - My favorite aggressive piece of hallucination hardware is a kit called The Brain Machine, created by Mitch Altman.
The Brain Machine (which was included in a how-to in Make Magazine in 2008 and is still available for sale as a kit from Adafruit) is a pre-programmed 15 minute 'experience' of LED patterns that pulse in front of your eyes, synced to a binaural sequence played in attached headphones. Both the LED pulses and the binaural tones are very strong, making this a very dialed to eleven sort of experience. It's an extremely satisfying experience, though, with colors, shapes, and pulsating visions all very attainable and relaxing.
(Note: I first found reference to the Brain Machine here on Boing Boing, via Mark - Thank you Mark - Including this advanced follow-up)
I met Mitch briefly one year at SXSW here in Austin and he's an awesome person, encouraging everyone to experiment with these kits. The Brain Machine is an easy build and was the first thing I'd ever soldered, leading to much to-do with modular electronics, so I'd like to thank Mitch for beginning a more immersive path into electronic music.
Here is your Bureau playlist for this week:
"People complain a lot about the space that I take up", says Lutenist Elizabeth Kenny
[Kenny] explains how and why the theorbo was developed in the 17th century, what it was used for, and what it's like to carry it around on the train.
More fabulous videos of ancient and obscure instruments await at the Orchestra of the Age of Enlightenment YouTube channel.
Ted Cruz has been accused of debating Beto O’Rourke in the style of a US college debater, more concerned with winning points than hearts. Twas ever thus.
In the autumn of 1992 I turned up at McGill University, Montreal. I’d wanted to go to France on Erasmus but didn’t qualify. One of my uncles, an economist at UCD, had cast around his desk for a flyer or a phone number, I don’t remember which. He named some other places, then Montreal, which we remembered was in Quebec, where two Belfast cousins had settled some time after my grandmother’s family took them in during the war. One of those cousins, Sean, still lived in Montreal, and was a pathologist at the university. His brother, the novelist Brian Moore, had written a novel about Jesuits in Algonquin that had been made into a film the year before, and featured a scene still etched in my memory of a cute, skinny young priest trying to maintain his dignity as he curled out a shit over the side of a long canoe, to the merriment of the First Nations guys rowing it. That was the clincher, so to speak.
In the first week at McGill, I auditioned for a play and tried out for the debate team. I was cast as a pillar in a Greek drama (no, I don’t know how that would have worked, either), and sent to represent McGill at a novice’s tournament in Bates College, Maine. Debating it was, then.
College debating in Ireland was just free entertainment on a Thursday or Friday night, with speakers prowling the pit of the merely medium-sized Theatre M, throwing out gags and being heckled viciously by what we then called friends, and what I now know were more like colleagues, the hacks in the box at the very top. There were often name-brand invited speakers, usually treated a little more respectfully, but only up to a point and the point was to be either masterful or entertaining, and ideally both.
Once, the British ambassador (or was it Secretary of State for Northern Ireland?) addressed us on the then-stalled peace process. Poor bastard. He seemed not to know that the ultimate sign of weakness in that setting was to read out a prepared speech. He may as well have pulled out his shrunken member and asked us to gently assess it. Worse, perhaps hoping his words would be faithfully reported in the media, he had brought and disseminated a dozen or so typed copies of his speech, each one neatly stapled and double-spaced. A few pages in, the audience grew restive as the great man portentously delivered himself of his wholly unremarkable remarks, and those in the first two rows who had been given copies of the speech began to read along in time with the speaker. Worse, as he neared the bottom of a page, they would loudly draw breath in the rather theatrical style of the public school educated Englishman, smoothly certain that the audience is on tenterhooks for the moment it takes him to turn over the sheet, and resume aping his words on the top of the next page in unison and with gusto, to roars of laughter and applause. That noble servant of Empire would stop to remonstrate, remind us of our manners and complain this was not the hospitality he expected of “the Irish”. We would relent, but a paragraph or so later it would start up again, as we realised first with hilarity, then in that helpless boredom of an acting out child, and ultimately with a sort of grudging respect, that he meant to carry on till the very end.
So you can see why I wanted to learn my trade somewhere off-stage.
As part of the McGill debate team, we would travel to tournaments on the weekend, mostly in eastern Canada and the north-eastern US. The rules were similar in both countries; you would be in a team of two, debating another team of two, and would win or lose on points awarded by judges, themselves student debaters. In Canada, there were points to be won by entertaining or inspiring the audience. In the US, it was more an attritional training for future litigators. You had to check each argument they made, no matter how stupid, otherwise it would be deemed to stand. The more arguments, the more points. The trick for us was to make the audience laugh or feel while also winning at the tedious arithmetical punch and judy.
For a couple of tournaments, as his normal partner wasn’t available, I debated with our team’s president. Gerry spoke with an authority that gathered the jangled masculinity of our many opposing alpha try-hards into itself, exposing their puff and strut as mere mummery. He knocked points down like an apex predator who has only occasionally to swat at something for it to shrink away. I’m not sure what I brought to the partnership. It’s hard to picture it, now. I had the novelty accent, for sure, plenty of earnest and the odd flash of wit. Whatever it was, we took home a fair amount of silver though I never won a tournament or placed in the top three.
We went to Harvard some time in the autumn of 1992, cutting through the preliminary rounds like a hot knife through butter. The semi-final was to be held in a medium-sized, steep walled amphitheatre, just like home. Our opposing team was also a man and a woman, Ted Cruz and a woman whose name I don’t remember. (In fact, I hadn’t recalled that it was Cruz till Gerry reminded me during the US presidential primaries a couple of years back.)
Just before we were due on stage, I nipped into the ladies’ loo. Coming out of the stall, I saw the woman I was about to debate. She was washing her hands. Somehow, part of her skirt had gotten caught up in her tights. I hesitated. She spotted me in the mirror and gave me a filthy look. Tant pis. Some people have to dislike you to fight you.
Moral dilemma: Do I tell her about her skirt or leave her to walk on stage with one ass-cheek hanging out, losing in that very first instant the power you must exert over the audience (that delicious, intoxicating power they both will you to seize and want to hold tight and crush you with)?
Obviously, I told her. Just as obviously, it made her hate me more.
We partner up and go into the amphitheatre through a door at the bottom. My position is ‘first opposition’, so it’s my job to come up with our main arguments and sketch out my own first speech during the first four minutes the woman is talking. Her job is to lay out the case, set a few traps, and balance getting enough points in during her few minutes, while – sometimes – leaving it as long as possible to get to the point, so I have less time to figure out the topic. But there are the set-piece debates of the time – gays in the military, Canadian media content rules, whether the fall of the USSR is desirable/reversible – and more often than not, it’s one of those. She opens her mouth and the first thing out of it is some nonsense about Northern Ireland. How there’s no point having a peace process, how we should all knuckle under to our imperial overlords, how terrorists gonna terrorize whether you talk to them or not.
Gerry and I can’t believe our luck. This patently ignorant Princeton team is going to debate us, two Irish and semi-Irish people, about Northern Ireland. In Boston.
Grinning and shaking my head, I jot down a few arguments. Gerry agrees, probably adds a couple of points, and up I go. To say it’s an easy crowd is an under-statement. Instead of outraged passion, I go for bemused incredulity. I get some laughs in and set things up for the longer, more substantive speech of my partner. But first, Cruz takes his eight minutes.
This would be a much better story if I could remember anything he said. Then again, it would only be a truly interesting story if student Cruz differed much from politician Cruz. He did not. He talked fast, he didn’t care about facts, he was condescending. He said things that probably sounded ok if you didn’t know what he was talking about and had a wont to agree with, but this was not the crowd for that. And yes, he had that plausibly handsome face already curving into a permanent sneer that threatens to unite nose and chin.
Gerry gets up and soberly, reasonably explains why our opponents are not merely mistaken, but dangerously wrong. Bing, bing, bing. Down their points go, with occasional, sturdy outbreaks of applause. Up the woman gets again, tries to rescue the case but it’s hopeless and she merely repeats where she needs to rebut. And it’s not her fault, really. It’s clear from their dynamic that Cruz calls the shots. He’s picked a bad topic and set up a useless case. It’s not her fault he’s her partner, or that she’s straitlaced and humourless and instinctively repelled my imprecations of sisterhood. So many American women debaters are just like that.
Because it’s autumn 1992 and Clinton v Bush has just happened, or is about to. Pat Buchanan has recently made the opening declaration of the culture wars. Hillary is equally despised for her uppity book-reading and her attempted cookie recipes, but it hasn’t yet occurred to me that the least-worst option then for clever American women is to follow the debate rules to the letter and never even attempt the men’s game of dominance and ball-baring humour.
As I prepare for my final speech, I’m not thinking any of this. I’m thinking ‘I can win without being a complete shit. That is the lesson of the restroom. Winning without being a complete shit about it is what we will show this smarmy, grinning Princeton turd.’
We hit the rest of our points home, pirouette a little for style, and accept the actually quite gracious congratulations of our opponents as the panel retires to a classroom to prepare their judging sheets.
Ten minutes later they return and declare us the losers.
The crowd boos. The Cruz grin is restored. Our tournament is over. It is all so perplexing and I keep asking what did we do, what did we do, is it a Canadian versus American kind of thing? Did we misunderstand the rules? And if we lost fairly, why is everyone so annoyed? I acquire a bottle of whiskey somewhere off Harvard Square and neck half of it in the main auditorium, watching the final. We’d have taken either team in it, easily. “I’m Irish,” I say to those around me, “I can drink this like a cup of tea.” I am twenty years old. I cannot.
Some time later, retching and spewing with my head in a basement toilet, I look up. However hazy I am about the other parts of this story (was it really Cruz, that time? Or was it that annoying blonde team from Yale?), this bit definitely doesn’t stack up. I look up from hugging the toilet to see a fair-haired woman asking, laughing, if I’m ok. She’s leaning over stairs I’m at the bottom of. There’s no way I could have been both in the restroom and seeing her at the top of the stairs, but I also know that in that moment I’m aware she’s been sent to check if I’m ok, she’s jealous that I’m currently Gerry’s debate partner, and pleased that I’m clearly a total mess. And this I also remember; I kind of agree with her. It’s just deserts for losing and maybe the toilet is where I live, now.
Later again, I’m in the audience of the auditorium and the prize-giving has begun. Our names are called out and we go down to collect the silver. We’re the highest ranked Canadian team at a US tournament, ever, at that point. I’m concentrating so hard on not falling over that I don’t realise till I’m on the stage that that my skirt is higher than it needs to be and I’ve got no shoes. There may also be a hole in my tights, but that may be a detail my memory has embroidered on. The prize-giver grimaces as we shake hands and I waft a whiff of whiskey-accented puke-breath his way. A few minutes later we do it all again for individual prizes. I’m not sure I ever find those shoes.
Eighteen hours later, we arrive back in Montreal and the team drops me off at the house of my cousins. I’ve never met them before. It’s Canadian Thanksgiving. There are the parents, and a son and daughter, both older than me but probably not by much. I haven’t eaten or drunk since the whiskey, and exhaustion and dehydration have set in. And hunger pains, but I don’t say a word to them about that. We make chit chat for about an hour and it’s agony. Just agony. For some reason, there are no snacks. I think maybe we wait a long time for the son to arrive. Finally, it’s time for dinner.
I stagger slightly making my way to the table but convert it into an odd little bob. There’s more conversation but I can’t contribute. Finally, finally, a bowl of clear soup appears, just inches from my mouth. I wait and wait till everyone has been served but find as I go to pick up the spoon that it’s not just the spoon that’s too heavy but also my hand, and my arm and maybe also my head. The conversation fades away into a thick silence that implies the room is wallpapered in carpet. My eyes feel closer together than they should be and some weird parallax thing is going on. I think about this carefully over the long moment the soup takes in its rush towards my face.
In the next moment I’m lying on the sofa with my feet up, and my female cousin who I seem to remember had boots herself and short hair and perhaps a nose-ring, is pulling my boots off. I fall in love with her a little, though now I wonder if I didn’t just want to be her? They are all so unfussy, but afterwards, when I’ve been fed and treated kindly and driven home, I’m too embarrassed ever to see them again.
The next scene takes place in a Princeton eating club the following spring. By then my early debating promise had tapered off. The final year students I was with sat at a wide table, eating breakfast and competitively tallying law school applications. In my memory, they check their mailboxes and return with acceptance letters. But this is unlikely as it would have been a Sunday. Most of them were genuinely impressive and delightful people, just finishing undergrad dissertations on topics whose contours I could barely make out. Some had been accepted by two Ivy League schools already and wondered which to attend. I suppose it was a little obnoxious, in retrospect. Cruz had been buzzing around the tournament, but I struggle to remember him as distinct from a couple of other similarly careerist and sexually persistent guys that weekend.
Mostly, I’d been thinking about a Scottish guy I’d met at another tournament and who told a story about his dog, Happy Dog. The guy would go out into the garden of their house in Aberdeen and cry “here, Happy Dog, come here”, then slide the sliding door shut so the dog ran into the glass. This seemed a hilarious story to me. Maybe it was the accent. Happily, Happy Dog’s owner found me a lot more resistible than I found him.
And lastly, London, spring 2018. Gerry comes to London for work and a bunch of us meet up in a pub. It’s been over twenty years. There’s a lot of talk about politics and then somehow we get on to Ted Cruz and that time we beat him and were inexplicably robbed of victory. And now, finally, I find out why. Within the last year or two, Gerry had run into one of the judges, I think, having moved house some time before and found the old judging sheets. The loss still seemed perplexing, so he asked what had happened.
“We didn’t want to waste the points,” was the answer. Turns out, in that hyper-competitive, detail-driven way, the US college debate system ranked people based on tournament performance. The more prestigious the tournament, the higher the points. The rankings had become integral to law school applications, so for the US debate judges to award valuable points to a Canadian team was basically just throwing them away. They could be used to help a member of the tribe into law school, and anyway, it wasn’t like they’d ever see us again. Tant pis.
Now, I think; We beat him, but he still won. Pertinent lesson, there, for anyone who debates the hard right.
I also think the lessons I took from it – don’t slack off when you’re winning, and think carefully about how acts of mercy are construed – worked on me perpendicularly. I’ve more or less crafted a life and career about performance (internal and external), avoiding both direct competition and team-work as much as I can.
And finally, I fervently hope O’Rourke beats Cruz. He’s not just a better debater. He’s a wildly better human.
